Industrial Chain Collaboration Network And Collaboration Capability Evaluation Research Based On Saas Adoption

With the rapid development of Internet technology and application software in recent years, Software as a Service (SaaS) has attracted worldwide interests and been gradually prevailed. According to Gartner’s report, the total revenue of global SaaS market exceeded21.1billion USD in2013compared with10billion USD in2012over the same period, the growth rate of which is about20.7%. Although SaaS created a great advantage for enterprises, there are still many enterprises feel reluctant to adopt this innovative technology.The existing research explores SaaS adoption factors from different theoretical perspective. For example, Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory describes those key factors influencing adoption as innovative technology features, users’characteristics and dissemination channel. Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) theory defined that technology, organization and environment are the key factors affecting organization users in SaaS adoption. The characteristics of SaaS industry are different from traditional software industry. SaaS industrial chain collaboration networks and capabilities play an important role in SaaS adoption of organization users. However, most of existing studies neglecte the influence of industry on organizational users’SaaS adoption. This study is to answer the following questions,1) how do we explain SaaS adoption factors with a comprehensive theoretical system?2) How do those members of SaaS industry implement collaboration from the industry perspective?3) How do SaaS industrial chain members balance their investment to achieve best collaboration from value network perspective?4) How do we comprehensively evaluate the collaboration capability of SaaS industry?This study is to analyze issues mentioned above from three aspects. The main research work and conclusions are as follows.First, this research proposes to integrate industrial collaboration into TOE and DOI theoretical framework as a factor affecting SaaS adoption. This hypothesis is then proved by an empirical study from276questionnaires data collection and analysis. The empirical study shows that SaaS industry development, such as industrial collaboration capability, is an important factor impacting organization users’intention in SaaS adoption. Besides, it also finds that organizational context (such as, high-level support and organizational size) and cost savings did not contribute to the prediction of SaaS adoption.Second, this paper creates a SaaS industrial chain collaboration Game model for SaaS industry chain members. By comparing industry chain collaboration Game equilibrium in the symmetric information and asymmetric information conditions, this research finds that the asymmetry information between industrial chain members has a negative impact to industrial collaboration. Meanwhile, this paper also establishes a collaborative investment Game model for SaaS industrial chain based on the value network theory. With the equilibrium analysis, it finds that the participating members of industrial chain will take the initiative to invest in SaaS industry chain only when they realized the SaaS industry chain collaboration are insufficient, which has no relation to the leading member’s investment scale.Third, this paper sets up a SaaS industry collaboration capability evaluation index system on the basis of the industrial chain collaboration model and empirically tested this system with fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. The results finds that the overall level of SaaS chain collaboration capabilities is still at a secondary level, which is resulted from three indexes effects as1) a secondary level management collaboration capability,2) a good level of the technical collaboration capability, and3) a secondary level of resource coordination capability. It explains the overall industrial chain collaboration capabilities have not been fully developed in current SaaS industry in China.The goal of this paper is to review the key factors in SaaS adoption from the industry collaboration perspective and to contribute to the government with some recommendations for the SaaS industry collaborative practice in order to promote more users to adopter SaaS. The innovative content of this paper includes following four aspects:First, this study brings the "industry collaboration" into the TOE theoretical framework to analyze how industrial collaboration makes impact to SaaS adoption. This new expanded theory is defined as TOIE theory that stands for Technical-Organization-Industry-Environment. Based on TOIE theory and combined with DOI theory, we then established an integrated model of the factors affecting the adoption of SaaS. This is regarded as a theoretical innovation by further expansion and research on the original SaaS adoption model.Second, prior studies on SaaS adoption identified cost saving, management support and organizational size have a positive contribution for adoption in organizations. Contrary to other findings, we found these three factors had no influence on the adoption of SaaS. This paper explains the reasons as1) for the developing enterprises, the service scope of SaaS might be extended upon the growing business requirement. If we count those additional costs into the total expense of adopting SaaS, it is obviously not reasonable for an enterprise to adoption this innovative technical mode with the intension of cost saving;2) SaaS, as a small range of software services, may not be addressed as a critical issue being concerned in an corporate strategy plan. Thus, SaaS adoption might not draw much attention from the top management level;3) these medium-sized or large companies pay much more attention on safety and reliability of service. This may be an important reason why the results show that firm size does not significantly influence the adoption SaaS.Third, this paper constructs two Game models. One is a collaborative Game model between SaaS industry chain members. The other is a SaaS industry investment collaboration Game model based on value network theory. For the first time, this paper analyzes SaaS industry chain collaboration issues from different points of view and contributes to the industry management and principle basis of SaaS industry chain collaboration network. In the collaborative model between SaaS industry chain members, we select SaaS service provider and network service provider as an example to give a best understanding of the collaborative relationship. In the SaaS industry investment collaboration Game model, it explains the investment Game between industrial members in order to further expand the SaaS industrial collaborative network.Fourth, this paper established a SaaS industry collaboration capability evaluation index system to ensure if the model is scientific and identify the practical obstacles in SaaS industry system development. This system further improves the accuracy, scientific and implementation ability of the research output and self-tests whether the model can achieve the expected effect. On the other hand, the system accurately indentifies the current status of SaaS industry development and put forward constructive suggestions to industrial collaboration that promoting organization users’intentions of SaaS adoption.This research provides not only a theoretical basis to SaaS providers to identify what are the key issues the SaaS consumers concern and how to further improve the quality of services, but also a practical basis for SaaS industry chain members to enhance their competitiveness. Meanwhile, it also contributes to the government with a useful theoretical reference to policies formulation based on the output of the industry chain collaboration empirical research.